AFFLICTION, and equally POVERTY — the abstract noun of the root behind ani, the poor man, so that in Hebrew the state and the person are the same word twice. ⭐ It is what God says he has seen: I have surely seen the oni of my people who are in Egypt (Exodus 3:7). ⭐ And it names the bread of the Passover: lechem oni, at Deuteronomy 16:3, a phrase that stands in exactly ONE verse of the Hebrew Bible. ⚠ The whole shelf reads it there as suffering — ‘the bread of affliction’, ‘the bread of tribulation’ — and this translation reads it as poverty, because the previous chapter had just used the person-form of the same root (15:11, your poor and your needy) and a reader should be able to see the connection without being told. Both senses are in the word; only one of them can be printed. ⚠ Not to be confused with oni spelled with an aleph, which means a fleet of ships. ⭐ In the creed of Deuteronomy 26:7 (now on these pages) it is the first of three nouns Jehovah saw — our affliction and our toil and our oppression — and it is his own word from the bush, I have surely seen the affliction of my people (Exodus 3:7), handed back in the first person plural. → first discussed at Deut 16:3